


Frozen Bride

by laliquey



Category: Political RPF - US 21st c.
Genre: Gen, Office, Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-10 05:15:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13495672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laliquey/pseuds/laliquey
Summary: A day at work, set in the summer of 2017 when the special counsel's team gets rolling.





	Frozen Bride

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!

Every bit of this Bob loves: the hours, the workload...it's even a muted pleasure to move through the building, with its wide halls and high ceilings common to government buildings of a certain vintage. The main conference room is a model of bland simplicity, and now and then he steeples his fingers at the head of the table and pretends to be thinking. There's rarely a time he isn't, but it's nice to pause and admire the human electricity at work all around him.

It's gratifying to know that this work will live on long after he's ash.

Floor cord covers mask their off-grid network and the team's been tripping over them less and less as they circulate between offices and back to the heart for scheduled updates. They've started to copy him, whether they know it or not. The pale colored shirts of early months have been replaced by a tailored black and white purity that requires no thought, and sometimes Bob loosens his tie in the late afternoon, just to watch who subconsciously follows. He likes this young new crop. They work hard but they speak a new language...and it's odd how much they favor the phrase "shit show."

He's reminded of his age again when Aaron slips him a picture, a page that instantly looks wrong because there's so much color on it and most of what they pore over is black and white.

"Hey Bob, look. It's you when this is all over!"

It's his balloon-jawed face pasted on a hawaiian-shirted fool drinking from a coconut shell.

He is as hard and blank as slate; he likes Aaron a lot, but... "You don't have time for this."

Everyone else in the room wants to be anywhere else. Aaron, especially. "I'm sorry. Bob-"

"Whatever conversation you're trying to start, we don't have time for that, either."

"I'm sorry."

"It's alright," he says with a gentle touch to his arm. "Back to work."

Hours later, Aaron nudges a Goldenberg's Peanut Chew by his elbow and silently turns away. God knows where he got it. Bob will wait a few days, in which Aaron will do some of his best work, and ask.

"Thank you."

*

It's getting late. So late that he senses an invisible contest of no one wanting to be the first to look restless, and it's tempting to order everyone boxed cannelloni from the Old Ebbitt Grill, but...

His favorite paralegal looks worn, with that one curl that escapes whenever the day gets long.

She snaps to attention when he clears his throat. "Round everyone up, please," he asks, and silently finishes his notes as the team files in.

"Take a few minutes to finish up," he says, and the room exhales. "As far as tomorrow, OCR's done on the latest paper dump and anything with marginalia's been separated out, so we'll look at those in the morning. And I'd like each one of you to come up with at least four search terms that aren't already on the list."

The answer rustles like a church response. "Yessir."

"Thank you all for your hard work."

Dozens of redwelds stack with great thumps, cases clap shut, and voices dance like school letting out. Bob's got his own pack-up ritual, too, but one hallmark of his that nobody's copying is the Stebco catalog case. It's an ugly, utilitarian thing, but they've been through a lot together. Three Christmas replacements he's given away to colleagues...and he's not superstitious, but it's not _not_ lucky, that he's aware of.

He stands and acts as a one-man reverse receiving line for every one of them on the way out.

"Goodnight, Bob."

"Thanks, Bob."

"We're gonna kill it tomorrow. I can feel it."

"'Night Bob. Have a good one."

"Aloha," Aaron says tentatively, and Bob can't help but smile.

"Goodnight."

*

A lingering fringe of pink sunset fades in the sky as he heads home, and it's no surprise that Ann's not there. He may have been told why - book group, maybe pickleball...but it's lost now, and yet another page in their long tome of gentle neglect. He's not sure how else a marriage could last this long, honestly, but there are little courtesies here and there, like the fridge holding a response to his halfhearted campaign to eat better: a covered bowl of odd grains and bitter little greens. Not really in the mood, he retreats to the study and has the peanut chew from Aaron instead.

He glances at the clock and vows to turn in at eleven, then pauses to take up one of his favorite objects.

It was a gift from his daughters decades ago: an alabaster justice lady suspended in a glass paperweight, with an intaglio face forever serene and still. Holding it tight and taking a minute to think has served him well in the past, sometimes providing breakthroughs that were almost always the opposite of what seemed obvious. There's often a much simpler and selfish reason for this ritual, though; it's a little space in time, just for him.

She's been his frozen bride for how many years, now? Quite a while.

This is new, though, for both of them. _Lordy,_ as Jim might say, doesn't even come close. There's never been a mess quite like this. A _cluster,_ as Aaron often says, and they're having to think in new ways to stop second-guessing things so ridiculous on the surface they expect them to mean something else. And plenty of it's peeled-back horror so rotten that the formality of process feels suffocating. But they're getting through it. The team's collective weave is as tight as a Moses basket and ready to float in any flood.

He turns the paperweight over. It's funny how summer's disappeared. Too much water in the south, far too parched in the west...nobody's getting what they want.

Well, almost nobody.

The glass has warmed to match his hand and he sets it down.

Break's over.

Back to work.


End file.
